New Server Recommendation(s)

[Tom Zaccaria]

Need recommendation for new server.
OD is freezing on our machines and I am told it is our five year old server that is the problem.

Currently we have a Dell PowerEdge 1900 with Windows 2003 server.
Use a mixture of Windows XP and Windows 7 pro in the office. Network printer.

IT guy wants over 12k to replace which I think is overkill. Budget will allow 3-4k.

I did check out a Dell PowerEdge T620 with Windows Server 2012 Standard edition.

Suggestions would be appreciated. Would like to stick with Windows.

drtmz

[tdong]

OD freeze on machines can be the machines problem. spam etc. OD only use MySQL which can be run on even desktop pc. We still run on poweredge2600 build i bought use for $400 and add pci sata. win 2003 still running for more than 6 years.

-My recommend server
-OS since you are buying new server 2012 standard
-OS on Raid 1 (2 x hard drive) Sata is cheaper than SAS
-Data on Raid 1 (2x harddrive) opendent doesn't require really fast drive however the XRay usually load raw image.

For dell your configuration is like this. I recommend Raid 1 bacause for the life of me over 15 years i have to rebuild raid 5 at least once a year and Raid 1 never.

-Dual power supplies
-OS Raid 1 - 2 x 146gig SASor 2x1 TB SATA
-DATA 2x600gig SAS 15K or 2x2TB SATA.
-Memory the server use less than 1 gig. get 4 or 8

upgrade your network to gigabit lan.

[drtech]

No way to 12k...only spend 2K, get a good $1500 server and upgrade your network's switch to a gigabit one for $100 (Trend net on Amazon), get gigabit network cards in your machines that don't have them ($15-$30 on Amazon)and you will be much happier.

[jordansparks]

It might be your server. What does your CPU and memory usage look like in the Task Manager on your server? If that looks good, then it's not your server.

[DJRCB]

12k is absurd. depending on the number of workstations and imaging software. you would do nicely with something like an hp proliant ml310e gen8, i think they retail for around $600- $700, grab some sata WD RE enterprise drives from newegg or even WD RED would work fine (please note you would have to buy the drive caddys from ebay or amazon) the total cost would be around $1300 to $1700 (depending on drives you choose).

for the o/s - win server 2012, win server 2008r2, i would even recommend using hyper-v (either stand alone server or as a role with win server 2012) virtualized environments are a great asset (most of the time).

as another user suggested raid 1 - i disagree, raid-1 is great for redundancy - thats it. raid 1 is the least efficient raid configuration, you get a 1 to 1 mirror of your data, so basically you get only 50% of your storage with no performance increase. however, i do agree that raid 5 is not any better (esp. without a dedicated hardware controller). I also do agree that you should get 4 drives, but i believe a raid 10 (1+0) is your best option. you get the best of both worlds, redundancy and performance, plus upto 2 drives can fail and you will still be up and running with no data lost (there are exception though). since your office management software and imaging software will most likely be SQL based, which is usually harddisk intensive, raid 10 is usually the best option for this.

good luck

[stjames70]

I would agree with DJRCB as far as RAID 1+0 being a good configuration to use. You get speed plus redundancy. Hardwired ethernet also works much better than wireless. We run virtual machines on all our servers and workstations. Talk to anyone running IT department these days, and they will confirm that from the server down to the workstations, no one runs on bare metal anymore. If your server ever fails or even one of your workstations fail, it takes hours to restart one of those. We run Win 8 and WinXP Pro on all Apple hardware. The Apple hardware is nothing special, but I do like MacOS X -- it is stable and not much a target for viruses yet.
The virtualized Win 8 environment is stable, rock solid, and where we had hardware or software problems, it took us about 20-30 minutes to throw away the diseased VM and plug in a virgin VM. It is like getting a new computer all set and ready to go with all your original software in 30 minutes or less.

But I also noticed that the people responding to your post are very proficient, so if you are not, pay the 12k and save yourself the trouble of trying to set anything up. If you are not good at this, you will never be.

[drtech]

What does everyone use for virtulization? I have tried proxmox, virtualbox, vmware, etc. I seem to get a stark difference in performance over a bare metal machine, thus I have not yet converted to VMs. (ie, testing copying files over the network 90 +mb/sec bare metal and 60/70+mb/sec VMs)

[stjames70]

Nightmares of the old blue screen of death in Windows based machines for one.....

But really, we use VM Ware's Fusion since we run Apple hardware. Truth is, we have extremely few problems with the virtualized set up, but on the one occasion where our server's main drive started to go kaput on us, I was able to restart the server within 45 minutes by opening a virtual copy of the server located on a secondary location. I have had to restart a server from scratch in the past, and it literally takes half a day to a full day before the system is fully functional again since all the programs, all the settings, the operating system and so forth have to be reloaded, reset and optimized.

Can you restart your server in 45 minutes or less? (and that is because that is the amount of time it took to copy the server VM and test it to make sure it was functional -- as a bonus, we could have used any of our workstations as the 'server' since VMs can be ported to any machine which has enough hardware resources to run it).

[DJRCB]

I prefer ESXi solely for the simplicity of installation and operation. ESXi does supprt some great features that other hypervisors dont. However, with that being said, i do use Hyper-V mostly. Once you get Hyper-V up and running and figure out how to connect to it and manage it, i think it sets itself apart from most others.

[stjames70]

Yeah, I checked out the website for ESXi. Pretty neat product, but since I like pretty graphical interfaces and ease of use, I went with Fusion. Commercialized product, but really, really easy to use. It piggybacks on Mac OSX, and runs on top of that environment. Since OSX has never gone down in the last six years, we feel confident that running Windows on top of that provides us with the best combination of ease of use and VM portability.

[DJRCB]

When i mention virtualiztion, im referring to a type-1 (bare metal) hypervisor. A bare metal hypervisor such as ESXi or Microsoft's Hyper-V is a thin layer software that runs between the system hardware and the O/S. ESXi and Hyper-V are server enivorment hypervisors. IMO almost all server setups nowadays should be virtualized with the exception of a few scenarios. I think you guys might be talking about a type-2 virtual environment. programs like VMware workstation, player, virutalbox etc etc, these are all programs that run and reside within (on top of) the systems o/s.

@ drtech - i would assume youre seeing slow downs in transfer speed because youre limited to the I/O of your HDD. im gonna assume you have a basic hard drive config. - single drive, no raid. it would make sense to me that your system o/s is using your HDD for the system files as well as hosting your virtualbox and now that same HDD is hosting the guest o/s too. i think your seeing a bottleneck on your HDD. your network most likely has a faster transfer rate then your HDD. I dont really see the point in running a virtual system in a basic workstation. maybe a VDI is a better option.